Healthcare.gov Goes Offline: Website Unavailable For 6 Hours On Morning Of Obamacare Deadline

Adding to healthcare.org’s growing list of troubles, the website to enroll for the Affordable Healthcare Act, or Obamacare, was offline for several hours Monday morning.

Technical glitches with healthcare.org are hardly worth a headline at this point, but Monday’s outage also coincides with the deadline to register for Obamacare. People rushing to enroll for health care were met with a “currently unavailable” message.

The Department of Health and Human Services said that the website was not brought down by a flood of users or by a hacker attack. Healthcare.gov went offline for routine maintenance, and a glitch kept it offline for an extra four hours. Users trying to enroll were placed in a queue and were notified by email when the website came back.

The Obama administration announced last week that anyone who got delayed by a glitch in the website will get an extension to complete the application. HHS said that users simply need to start an application by Monday’s midnight EDT deadline.

The website went offline around 3:20 a.m. EDT and returned around 9 a.m. EDT. At the time of writing everything seems to be working normally.

The administration claimed that as of last week, 6 million people had applied for insurance through the websites created by President Barack Obama’s Affordable Healthcare Act.